First off, can you tell me about your business and what you offer?
In short we make software for Photographers. Cross platform desktop apps and a cloud-based service that more or less is about helping produce deliverables from images. Those deliverables might be blog posts, Facebook galleries or photo books.
How long has your business existed online? What is the origin story?
BlogStomp was born out of this necessity in 2009 – its frustrated founders wanted to spend less time behind a computer screen, and more
time out doing what they love: making photographs. Initially BlogStomp was comprised of a set of Photoshop-based tools. Their success was soon followed by a desire to make the BlogStomp functionality more accessible to users who may not use specific software products such as Photoshop. Thus, the BlogStomp application was born.
Since Version 1’s release in early 2011, the BlogStomp user base has grown rapidly.
We’re now at Version 2 which further improves workflow efficiency and provides users with access to more functionality allowing them to do more from directly within the App.
What makes your product unique?
We make the boring-and-tricky fun-and-quick in a nutshell. We try to remove the nonsense out of a process and inject a bit of humor along the way.
How do you market your business?
Thankfully we don't have too, much. We obviously do make efforts but word of mouth has been the biggest contributor my a great margin.
How has your sales/marketing strategy changed over time?
I wish I could say we've evolved to some mature state of a CRM process that will wow fellow entrepreneurs but the reality is that we've focused on making our products cool and fun to use.
How did you go about designing and creating your site?
We rolled our own Wordpress site with the help of some inhouse geekery and some outsourced design.
We rolled our own Wordpress site with the help of some inhouse geekery and some outsourced design.
What do you think an online shop has to do to stand out and be competitive? What has made your shop successful? What is the best advice you’ve received about running an online shop?
I think the biggest thing about e-commerce is that the shop or rather the process shouldn't feature at all. Things should happen with very little thought, an obvious and intuitive process. E-junkie has kept that simple for us and allowed some tight integration. For example our upgrade paths have removed unnecessary steps like manually entering a discount code because the user has followed a link provided.
If I were planning to open an online shop, what would you tell me to do to prepare?
Count the number of clicks required consider all the ways to reduce that number. Then do that same with required fields. Don't make checkout or any process a barrier to entry.
I think the biggest thing about e-commerce is that the shop or rather the process shouldn't feature at all. Things should happen with very little thought, an obvious and intuitive process. E-junkie has kept that simple for us and allowed some tight integration. For example our upgrade paths have removed unnecessary steps like manually entering a discount code because the user has followed a link provided.
If I were planning to open an online shop, what would you tell me to do to prepare?
Count the number of clicks required consider all the ways to reduce that number. Then do that same with required fields. Don't make checkout or any process a barrier to entry.
Success for the BlogStomp.
Thanks for sharing great news.I really like this post.